Sunday, 4 April 2010

No Need For Religion

In this modern world I find it extraordinary that people still feel the need for religion and to have a God to worship. People accept the gifts that science has brought them, making their lives more comfortable, but when this same science albeit in a different field to the technological one that brings all the toys and luxuries of their comfortable lives shows with great proof that there is no truth in the creation story in the Old Testament….. they reject it.

The creation story in the Bible is not unique to the Judaic, Christian and Islamic world. Other cultures have their creation stories too, and their Gods, and God. As I am not versed in all of them, I will not go into them, except one example of God that seems to have been the most favoured the Sun. The Egyptians worshiped it. So did the Druids in the British Isles, and the people of South America. You see ancient peoples could not explain the world they lived in, but one object was always prominent, always there…. the Sun. So they worshiped it. Sacrificed to it, animals, and their fellow human beings, sometimes even their own children. The story of Abraham willing to kill his only son on the command of God is a good example. What would drive a person to kill his own child, fear, some sort of insecurity less the Sun should go away. They understood that without it there would be no food, and no life. So they started to build fantasies around this God they had invented. These fantastic stories were relayed by word of mouth by story tellers. Over time these stories, or religions changed as stories do when handed down from generation to generation, until they were finally written down. As stories they are great works of fiction, yes fiction, because there is not a shred of substantial evidence to support them. Believers will argue against this, because they genuinely believe in these religions, but when you ask them to produce evidence, all they can show you is a book. In the case of the Old Testament if they are English speakers it’s a translation from the Latin, from the Greek from Hebrew from the original Aramaic. Well we all know the phrase “lost in translation”.

Now we come to the great enemy of religion Evolution. The problem that a lot of religious people have with evolution is that it shows that there was no creator, no creator, no creation as laid down in the Bible. The Bible states that the world was created by God in 6 days, and he rested on the seventh. Also using the various time spans mentioned in the Bible the world is around six thousand years old. This can easily be disputed, as the Chinese have astrological charts much older than this time frame. On the other hand evolution says that the world is very, very, very much older than this, and with modern resources science can date our planet to 4.5 billion years of age.

Fossils, geological structure of rocks using carbon dating has proved this. The other problem the religious have is that we humans are descended from animals; the worst of these is that we are cousins of Apes. In the Bible it states that we humans are created in Gods image, and are higher than the creatures that inhabit this planet along side us. In recent years extensive research into the behaviour of apes particularly Chimpanzees has shown how similar the two species of man/woman and Apes are. Apes kill, unlike most other animals not just for food, but like humans for territory, this is murder. They like some humans are bisexual, homosexual. They like us masturbate and commit incest. Like us they can build tools to solve certain problems, but unlike human females child birth for them is not painful. The reason women scream when giving birth is because humans walk upright. This has made women’s birth canal much smaller than other animals, a trait of evolution. Not the work of an all powerful entity. This is just one of many proofs that we are descended from Apes. Also the Bible states that woman was made from man. This is wrong. The template for mammals is female. Females have 2 X chromosomes, males have 1 X & 1 Y chromosome, this is the reason men have nipples though of cause men can not produce milk, they are of no use. Would a creator make such a mistake? It is obvious to anyone who knows anything about monotheistic religions that they are male dominated. So it is only natural that the writers would make the male the model for humans. Men are stronger physically than women, and dominate society, but in the genetic world, it is women who are the dominant species. Religion and its teachings have caused most of the conflicts on this planet. The religious books are full of violence, hate towards others because they don’t believe the same, as others do, and because they are different. We must hope that in time, we humans will throw aside the old superstitions, beliefs, and see the world for what it is. A beautiful place that belongs to all of us, and that it is in our hands, and only in our hands that its destiny can be determined. No God or Gods are involved. Only ourselves.

I’ll end with the words of John Lennon’s Imagine.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

1 comment:

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About Me

I was born in the UK. Where I went to school, learned my trade, and worked for 10 years.
In 1971 I emigrated to Israel, after having spent a year as a volunteer on a Kibbutz in 1970.
In 1972 I married a Russian who had emigrated to Israel also in 1972. We have two boys, and two grandchildren from our eldest son.
More about our lives will emerge in the Blogs.
I'm vehemently against religion, having lived here in the Middle East for so long, and seen what religion does, and the cost it requires in human life. I hate it.